The blog of fantasy author Shanna Swendson. Read about my adventures in publishing and occasionally life.

Monday, June 13, 2016

Airships and Wizards

I'm still sitting around in a warmish house, though fortunately we had rain and cooler temperatures yesterday, so it hasn't been so bad. I have an appointment on Tuesday afternoon, so I hope that means it'll be fixed then. I resorted to social media shaming and got a response from customer service, so I'm currently mentally composing an epic e-mail.

But I will prevail! I have a lot of stuff I need to get done to prepare for this week's trip, and I'm still in reading/research mode. Ideas are starting to take shape in the back of my head. After today, I start seriously working on developing a plot.

I fell down a rabbit hole of On Demand documentaries from the Smithsonian Channel yesterday, with one on the Hindenburg disaster, one on the Masada massacre, and one on Merlin. There's a lot of airship stuff in Rebel Magisters, with some of the characters taking a long airship trip, and when I researched what the cabin would be like and how long the trip would take, a lot of the info I was able to find led back to the Hindenburg and previous airships like it. There are lots of photos of the passenger lounge area and cabins, and then what helped me for figuring out how long the trip I had in mind would take was a press voyage of one of them that went up the east coast. That gave me how long one part of the trip would take, and then I estimated from there based on distance how long the other parts of the trip would take. My interior would be different because mine is a smaller private ship instead of a commercial passenger ship, and it's Victorian rather than 1930s (and runs on magic), but the photos gave me a good sense of what the layout might be and what the private cabins might be like (a lot like a private compartment on a passenger train). Even though the book is done, I still couldn't resist watching the documentary to see if I got any other ideas, but the focus was more on the aftermath and the investigations.

I may have to re-watch the other two because I was working crossword puzzles at the time and only halfway paying attention. The Merlin one was mostly about how that kind of character has been used throughout history and literature. No mention about a dapper gentleman in a business suit. Hmmph. I also got a little sidetracked during that one because there were a lot of paintings of Welsh bards with harps, and that made me want to play my harp. I'm getting pretty good at "Scarborough Fair," in an arrangement that actually uses both hands playing different notes at different times. I may even be ready to move on to the next lesson, finally. That playing with both hands thing really hung me up for a long time.

And now to praying for rain (and cool) while doing laundry and fuming.